A strength of spirit forged by three tragedies
Some people manage to sail through their lives almost unscathed by personal tragedies. Not Claire Tomalin, award-winning biographer of, among others, Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen. In her 84 years, she has suffered three. Her son Daniel lived for just a month. Her first husband, journalist Nick Toma-lin, was killed in 1973, aged 41, by a heat-seeking missile in the Golan Heights, Israel. And in 1980, one of her three daughters, Susanna, changed from being a golden, brilliant oxford undergraduate to ‘a small husk of herself’, in the grip of black depression that led to her suicide.
on top of that, Claire and Nick’s last child, Tom, was born with spina bifida, and has never been able to walk.
In this beautifully written memoir, Tom comes across as an adorable, adored boy, for whom having spina bifida is possibly the least interesting thing about him.
Tomalin recalls of the days after Tom’s birth: ‘It’s hard to describe the intensity of the bond between mother and new-born, but it is as fierce and romantic as any love affair. When the situation is uncertain, precarious, threatening, the love grows fiercer.’
When she was a young widow and Tom was being brought up in a female household with a mother and three sisters, Claire started employing male nannies for him. The innocent young Tom said to a bearded stranger in a shop in Camden: ‘Why don’t you shave? my nanny shaves.’
‘At which,’ she writes, ‘the man left the shop rapidly.’ Those verbal brushstrokes exemplify Tomalin’s ability to depict char-acter. She has a gift for saying important things, but not dwelling on them or over-writing. of her daughter’s death, she writes: ‘I should have protected her, and I failed. The system failed, too, badly and inexplicably, and so she was lost.’
But there’s a serenity about Tomalin, with an inner grit and joyousness, that has got her through the darkest times. Coming across her French father emile’s memoir later in life, in which he described the misery of his marriage to her english mother muriel, Claire discovered she had been con-ceived ‘not only without love, but with the gritted teeth of murderous loathing’.
Pretty and clever, Claire achieved a first
in English at Newnham College, Cambridge. There, she met Nick, a handsome, Left-wing undergraduate, and was swept into marrying him by the enthusiasm of their families.
At her wedding she heard her father-in-law say to him: ‘You will be good to her, Nick, won’t you?’ There was, she noticed, ‘an unmistakable note of doubt in his voice’.
After their third daughter, Emily, was born, Claire found herself ‘living through the most banal of stories, as the neglected wife of a faithless husband’.
He could be violent; she has kept the broken wooden hand-towel rail that he smashed while aiming to punch Claire when he discovered that she, too, had had a brief fling.
The marriage carried on until 1973 when he was killed in Israel.
Heartbreakingly, a letter from him arrived a few days after his death, and a postcard for Tom.
With admirable clarity and honesty, Tomalin writes: ‘However much I missed him, I was already distanced from him. I had learned too well that I could not depend on him.’
She became a literary editor and biographer, and in 1974, when she was 40 and the novelist Martin Amis was 25, they had a thrilling love affair: she couldn’t resist ‘the charm of his smoker’s voice, so deep that it made him sound older than he looked’.
But ‘I began to realise that what I thought of as a love affair was more like membership of a club’.
Now she is happily married to the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.
‘Middle-aged love proved stronger than anything I had known before,’ she writes, ‘and enduring.’